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The View from My Kitchen

Benvenuti! I hope you enjoy il panorama dalla mia cucina Italiana -- "the view from my Italian kitchen,"-- where I indulge my passion for Italian food and cooking. From here, I share some thoughts and ideas on food, as well as recipes and restaurant reviews, notes on travel, and a few garnishes from a lifetime in the entertainment industry.

You can help by leaving comments on posts and by becoming a follower. More than a hundred thousand people all over the world have viewed the blog and that's great. But every great leader needs followers and if I am ever to achieve my goal of becoming the next great leader of the Italian culinary world :-) I need followers! I promise, I'm not going to spam anybody. I'd just like to know who's out there and what your thoughts are on what I'm doing.

Grazie mille!

Friday, May 10, 2013

Want To Live Past 100? Eat More Bacon!

Up until recently, conventional wisdom
told us that bacon and eggs would surely be the death of us all. An
entire generation was frightened into believing that eggs contained
enough cholesterol that eating more than one a week was going to
close up your arteries and send you to an early grave.

Guess that's
why my grandfather made it into his eighties on a steady diet of four
eggs per sitting four or five days a week. And, of course, the
“killer egg” theory has now been thoroughly discredited.

Bacon is still getting the rap, though.
Only it's not fat or cholesterol that's supposedly going to put you
in permanent stasis, it's nitrates. Used in the curing process, they
convert at high temperatures to carcinogenic nitrosamines that attack
your pancreas and are also said to be a factor in COPD.

Which is why, as a dedicated,
bacon-loving American I proudly introduce to you Pearl Cantrell.
She's a widow and mother of seven who lives in Texas, where she mowed
her own lawn until recently and still dances a mean two-step. Oh, and
by the way, she's 105. When asked – as centenarians inevitably are
– for the secret of her longevity, she replied, “I love bacon. I
eat it every day.”

Now, “every day” may be overdoing
it a bit. As much as I love the porcine ambrosia that comes from the
belly of a pig, I only eat it once or twice a week. You know, the old
saying about “too much of a good thing”? Even one of the more
apologist studies conducted by the University of Zurich and involving
nearly a half-million people points to “moderation” as a means to
reduce “premature deaths” among processed meat eaters by up to
three percent. Apparently, Pearl was not part of the study group.

Now, to be fair, you've got to look at
a few other minor factors. It's really easy to say, “My grandfather
ate a dozen eggs and a pound of bacon for breakfast every day and he
outlived his doctor by thirty years.” Most of those hearty old
souls – like Pearl – worked their fannies off on a daily basis.
Pearl picked cotton and baled hay. She didn't ride around on a garden
tractor when she mowed her lawn, she pushed a mower. And she dances
just for fun. I expect that if she had chained herself to a desk for
forty years and then retired to a rocker in front of the TV, she'd
have been gone a long time ago, bacon notwithstanding. So many people
today ignore the “exercise” part of the “diet and exercise”
equation. Yes, our forebears ate like pigs, but they also worked like
horses. Most of my adult life, I've had to find a time and a place to
“exercise.” People like Pearl and my grandfather exercised
because their lifestyles left them no other choice. That's largely
why they could eat all those eggs and all that bacon with such
abandon and impunity.

Nonetheless, I say, “You go, girl”
to Pearl Cantrell. More than two hundred well-wishers recently feted
her feat at a three-day-long birthday party. And when Oscar Meyer got
a whiff of her bacon eating prowess, they sent her a supply of the
stuff and let her ride around town in the Weinermobile. Next time I
pass through Tennessee, I intend to see Allen Benton at Benton's
Smoky Mountain Country Hams in Madisonville and talk to him about
sending Pearl some good bacon
for her next birthday. It'll probably arrive in a UPS truck instead
of a Weinermobile, but I guarantee she'll treasure the memory of
eating it if she lives another hundred and five years.So is
a daily dose of bacon really the secret to good health and long life?
Sadly, no. But you've got to admit, it's a fun story.

Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

I've been around long enough to know a little bit about a lot of things. That said, there are a couple of things I know a little bit more about; food and entertainment.

I've been cooking since I was a kid -- a very long time, indeed -- and I've spent most of my adult life in the entertainment industry.

I've been writing about one or the other of these topics since the '80s, and I have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers over the years. I also spent the better part of two decades behind a microphone as the host of my own radio talk show.

Does all of this make me an expert? Nah! But I'm certainly entitled to my opinion -- and so are you! :-)